Are you ready for UBER Radio?

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Uber / oober/  denoting an outstanding or supreme example of a particular kind of person or thing’.

It’s a German word meaning ‘above’ or ‘over’ it does not mean super or supreme.

I’d love to get my hands on a last place radio station and show you what UBER Radio is all about.  Remember the German meaning of the word uber as ‘above’ or ‘over’.   Uber radio would be just that. 

Take every format you’ve experienced and park it.  Why do that?  Because it’s not relevant in the world we live in.

They are boring, derivative and out of touch with media consumers.

I had a meeting in Chicago with the great radio legend Lee Abrams.  He’s moved away from traditional terrestrial radio and XM Satellite Radio and is now exploring ‘V’.  I can’t get into specifics of ‘V’ but what I can tell you is that media consumers are looking more and more to the cloud and the many offerings. 

All of Lee’s ‘V’ content is cloud based, with lots of variety and easy to access.  ‘V’ will focus on the mass appeal media offerings.  It’s all about great content curation.  That’s what Lee Abrams is a master of.

In Australia Guy Dobson, Greg Smith, Brad March, Brad McNally and Jeff Allis fall into that category.  All creative, audience aware and not afraid to take chances to win their share of audiences.  They are all UBER!

Listeners with their smart phone and tablets are now curators and programmers of their own media world.  Unfortunately radio can’t respond as quickly to Uber (above or over) but your audiences can.

Yes, radio will survive if it focuses on being ‘hyper local and in touch with the niche things that are specific to the market it serves.  That’s always been the case.  Radio is going to have to get into more community things that it ever has to carve out a place in consumers lives.

Now that we are connected to every conceivable source of music, entertainment, global information many of your listeners are fast becoming ‘UBER MEDIA GYPSY’S’.  They Uber genie is out of the bottle and never going back in.

Have you used UBER taxi’s.  I have.  They are fast, reliable and cost less than the usual taxi’s.  Initially the Cab companies went nuts and threatened Uber taxi’s with law suits and got very heavy handed.  It’s didn’t work.  Uber Taxi’s simply outflanked traditional Taxi’s and went to an APP based service.  Simple, reliable and affordable transportation. 

UBER is fast becoming a buzz word for other things that we want, use and desire.  I’ll let you imagination run with that for a bit.

We have Spotify, RDIO, Songza and others vying to be your music resource.  You can find anything you want on the web at anytime.  Much of it is free, others will cost you, but not that much.

I wanted to watch Hozier’s Grammy performance with Annie Lennox.  You Tube had it. We live in an ‘on demand world’. 

If your radio station is in the doldrums, I suggest you apply Uber thinking to help you evolve.  Traditional listeners are connected like never before.  They now have so many choices for everything.

Let’s use Radio Today as a sounding board for radio’s current problems and issues.  Let’s be more aware of new approaches for our listeners. 

Be brave….think and be UBER.

About Dave Charles:

Dave Charles is a global broadcast and creative media strategist with over four decades of radio, talent development, and new format creation in over 45 countries. With business partner John Parikhal he formed “Joint Communications Corp” consulting in Canada, U.S., U.K., Europe and Australia. 

Dave’s worked at Austereo and ESP – Entertainment Strategy Programming and is now at Mri ,Media Results International and his new sport, event, media and music design company Major League Mixes. You can email Dave Charles here or head to his company website here.

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